A Kerala man who went missing last year and joined the Islamic State has been killed in an operation by Afghan-US forces in Afghanistan, a senior intelligence official said on Wednesday. Saifuddin is the second resident from the state to have been killed fighting for the IS in Afghanistan over the last fortnight, a fact that underlines the deepening influence of the extreme Salafi ideology in the state. Security agencies have been able to track 98 cases of men, women and children from Kerala joining IS terrorists. By June this year, 38 of them had died. Malappuram, 350 km from state capital Thiruvananthapuram that was home to Saifuddin, is among the top three districts that have accounted for the largest number of people who joined the uber radical group comprising IS remnants from Syria and Iraq that are trying to expand their footprint towards Kabul. Kannur and Kasargod are the other two. Saifuddin had turned to extreme Salafism when he was still completing his studies. His interest in the Salafi ideology deepened after 2014 when he migrated to Saudi Arabia to get himself a job. He found one in the Saudi kingdom’s port city of Jisan and also kept attending Salafi religious classes at different centres, a security official said.
